Ayer me dí cuenta, haciendo una instalción de longomatch en un sistema “virgen” de ubuntu y debian, que había un error en el archivo debian/control .

En ambos sistemas operativos no incluía los bindings de db4o para C# como dependencia, lo cual generaba un error al ejecutar el programa al no encontrarse este componente.

Además, en debian sid se el componente Mono.Posix se distribuye en un paquete externo, teniendo que añadirlo como dependencia.

Otra cosa curiosa en debian sid, es que el compilador de mono se llama gmcs2, en vez de gmcs. He tenido que modifiar los archivos de autotools añadiendo una variable global llamada GMCS, que varía en función de la versión instalada de la siguiente forma en el archivo configure.ac:


AC_PATH_PROG(MCS, gmcs, no)
if test "x$MCS" = "xno"; then
AC_PATH_PROG(MCS2, gmcs2,no)
if test "x$MCS2" = "xno"; then
AC_MSG_ERROR([gmcs Not found])
else
AC_SUBST(GMCS,[gmcs2])
fi

else
AC_SUBST(GMCS,[gmcs])
fi


Son muchas las distribuciones que he probado en mi vida, pero hay una que me enamoró desde el principio… Debian.  Me encató la forma en que se gestionan los paquetes mediante apt-get y como se organizaba la distribución en distintas ramas según la estabilidad de los paquetes. Venía de Windows, donde era impensable instalar cualquier programa con un simple comando, y mi paso por redhat fué un poco frustante, ya que por esa época rpm todavía no gestionaba las dependecias de los paquetes. Por esa razón, una de mis grandes ilusiones fue la de tener un programa en los repositorios oficiales de Debian.

Al presentar LongoMatch al concurso universitario de Software Libre y ver que el programa estaba funcionando bien, se me pasó por la cabeza empezar a buscar la forma para incluirlo en Debian, y así es como descubrí Debian Mentors. Debian Mentors es un repositorio de paquetes público, a través del cual se ofrece la posibilidad de incluir paquetes en los repositorios oficiales sin ser un “Debian Developer”.

Los “Debian Developers” son los únicos que pueden subir paquetes a los repositorios oficiales, y debian mentors ofrece un punto de enlace entre los aspirantes y los “Debian Developers”. Así que la forma que tenemos los desarrolladores ajenos al proyecto Debian de conseguir ver nuestros paquetes en Debian es consiguiendo un “Sponsor”, es decir, un “Debian Developer” que revise el paquete, le dé el visto bueno y lo suba por nosotros.

El proceso es bastante simple:

1. Creas una cuenta en debian mentors
2. Subes tu paquete
3. Buscas un “Sponsor”
4. Sigues las recomensaciones de tu “Sponsor”
5. Con un poco de suerte tu paquete será incluido en los repositorios de Debian.

Introduction

Debian-like systems use APT, a free user interface that works with core libraries to handle installing software on Linux. Apt can be functionally considered to be a front-end to dpkg. While dpkg performs actions on individual packages, apt tools manage relations (especially dependencies) between them, as well as sourcing and management of higher-level versioning decisions (release tracking and version pinning).

For this guide I supose that your project uses the autotools buid system. That’s why I will use CDBS which is a tool that uses debhelper to make building and maintaining Debian packages even easier. It has many advantages:

Configuration Files

changelog

The changelog file is, as its name implies, a listing of the changes made in each version. It has a specific format that gives the package name, version, distribution, changes, and who made the changes at a given time.

The first line includes the package’s name (longomatch) and the package’s version (0.9.1-1hardy1) followed by the distribution’s name (hardy)

The changelog for the longomatch package:

longomatch (0.9.1-1hardy1) hardy; urgency=low

   *Improved video editor
   *Added templates support
   *Added internationalization support

– Andoni Morales Alastruey Tue, 18 Nov 2008 23:50:00 +0200

control

The control file contains the information that the package manager (such as apt-get, synaptic, and adept) uses, build-time dependencies, maintainer information, and much more.

For the longomatch package, the control file looks something like:

Source: longomatch

Section: devel

Priority: extra

Maintainer: Andoni Morales Alastruey <my@mail.com>

Build-Depends: debhelper (>= 5), autotools-dev, cdbs, pkg-config, mono-gmcs,libdb4o6.0-cil, libgtk2.0-cil,libgstreamer0.10-dev, libgstreamer-plugins-base0.10-dev, libgtk2.0-dev, libmono2.0-cil, libmono-cairo2.0-cil

Standards-Version: 3.7.2

Package: longomatch

Architecture: any

Depends: ${shlibs:Depends}, ${misc:Depends}, mono-runtime, ffmpeg, mencoder

Description: LongoMatch:The Digital Coach

Sports video analyze tool for coaches

and trainers to assist them  on making live video reports

from a match. It creates a database with the most

important plays of a game, grouped by categories, to easily

access them and to create play lists and new videos from the

selected plays.

copyright

This file gives the copyright information. Generally, copyright information is found in the COPYING file in the program’s source directory. This file should include such information as the names of the author and the packager, the URL from which the source came, a Copyright line with the year and copyright holder, and the text of the copyright itself. LongoMatch includes the following copyright file:

This package was debianized by Andoni Morales Alastruey <my@mail.com> on

Tue, 02 Sep 2008 03:04:08 +0200.

Upstream Author(s):

Andoni Morales Alastruey <my@mail.com>

Copyright:

Copyright (C) 2008 Andoni Morales Alastruey <my@mail.com>

License:

This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify

it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by

the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or

(at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,

but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of

MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the

GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License

along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software

Foundation, Inc., 59 Temple Place, Suite 330, Boston, MA 02111-1307 USA

The Debian packaging is (C) 2008, Andoni Morales Alastruey <ylatuya@gmail.com> and

is licensed under the GPL, see `/usr/share/common-licenses/GPL'.

# Please also look if there are files or directories which have a

# different copyright/license attached and list them here.

rules

The last file we need to look at is rules. This does all the work for creating our package. It is a Makefile with targets to compile and install the application, then create the .deb file from the installed files. It also has a target to clean up all the build files so you end up with just a source package again. CDBS is a set of Makefile includes that uses debhelper to make building and maintaining Debian packages even easier. It uses advanced features of Makefiles to abstract the build process, so rules files end up primarily as a series of include statements. The final rules file using CDBS looks like this:

#!/usr/bin/make -f

include /usr/share/cdbs/1/rules/debhelper.mk

include /usr/share/cdbs/1/class/autotools.mk

As you can see the rules configuration files is very simple. CDBS scripts delegate all the work to autotools.

Creating the binaries package

The next step is to build the binaries package and the sources packages which are built calling the following commands in the ./debian directory:

# debuild -b (to build the binaries package)

# debuild -S (to build the sources packages)

debuild will parse all the previous files and will create a .deb package